Orangutan to be freed from zoo in Argentina after court passes 'non human person rights' ruling

Free at last: Sandra the orangutan will be freed from a Buenos Aires zoo after spending her life in captivity. AP

An orangutan held captive in an Argentinian zoo is to be freed after a court passed a ruling giving it "non-human persons" legal rights.

In an unprecedented ruling, an Argentinian court agreed with lawyers that Sandra, a 29-year-old Sumatran orangutan, although not human, should be given basic human rights.

The ape is now set to be freed from the zoo where she has spent her whole life, having moved to the Buenos Aires zoo 20 years ago after being born at a German zoo.

The decision means that several thousand other cases could now be brought forward.

If there is no appeal, she will be transferred to a sanctuary in Brazil where she will be allowed greater freedom.

The case was launched after animal rights campaigners filed a habeas corpus petition - which tends to challenge whether a person's detention or imprisonment is legitimate - last November on behalf of the shy orangutan.

They had argued she had been illegally detained, and the case was based on whether she could be treated as a "thing" or a "person".

The chances of victory appeared slim given that in December, a New York Court rejected calls for a privately owned chimpanzee to be given human rights, arguing that the animal was property and no legal rights.

But in this case, Argentina's Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights (Afada) successfully argued Sandra's behaviour meant she was a "person" in the philosophical sense, rather than the biological.

Afada lawyer Paul Buompadre was quoted as saying by La Nacion newspaper: "This opens the way not only for other Great Apes, but also for other sentient beings which are unfairly and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in zoos, circuses, water parks and scientific laboratories."